CSP – New Commerce Experience
The introduction of the CSP New Commerce Experience (NCE) model has been delayed from October 2021 to January 2022. Customers on the existing CSP model (soon to be known as CSP Legacy) will be able to migrate to NCE when it launches to lock in their pricing for another year ahead of the 1 March 2022 global price increase. Alternatively, as each subscription’s anniversary date is reached these will be migrated over to NCE (but 1 March price increase will apply).
There are some big changes with the NCE model such as a 20% price premium if the flexibility of a monthly commitment is needed. To avoid the 20% premium price the other option is annual commitment however this does not allow quantities to be reduced during the year. The subscription type (ie. M365 E3) will also be locked in until the anniversary date however there will now be upgrades to enable moving up a level ie. M365 E3 to E5 Upgrade.
We will be in touch prior to the January launch with more detail but please get in touch with Lexel with any questions you have in the meantime. Coming to the Cloud Solution Provider program: seat-based offers in new commerce – Microsoft Partner Network
Veeam Per Socket – End of Sale
Veeam has announced that they will cease the sale of per-socket licenses from 1 July 2022 for all editions to both new and existing customers.
Renewals of existing per socket licenses will continue to be available (restricted to a maximum of 3 year renewal term) but if you are looking to add additional servers to your environment it is recommended you purchase any extra socket licenses needed before 1 July 2022.
Office 2021 now available
Microsoft has released the 2021 versions of Office, Project and Visio on 5 October 2021 and these are now available to purchase through the CSP Perpetual programme. If you have active Software Assurance on these products you will now be able to download the 2021 software and product key. Office 2021 is a perpetual, device based license as opposed to the subscription, per user model available via M365 Apps for Business/Enterprise (or suites that include these).
You can read more about this announcement at Office LTSC is now generally available – Microsoft 365 Blog and a list of new features in Office 2021 is at What’s new in Office 2021 (microsoft.com)
Open License programme – sunsetting 31 December 2021
Last year Microsoft announced that on 31 December 2021 they are retiring the Open License programme and new software releases (such as Windows Server 2022 and Office 2021) will not be offered through this programme.
The CSP Perpetual and Open Value programmes have been extended to include government, education and non-profit licenses so the options for Open License customers are now:
- Licence-only customers can instead purchase licenses through CSP Perpetual. Any perpetual licenses previously bought through an Open License agreement can continue to be used
- License & Software Assurance customers can purchase new licenses or renew Software Assurance through a new or existing Open Value agreement